Product Owner

BW Career Site 1; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Life cover 4x salary

Income protection

Private medical insurance

Pension scheme 5%/10%

25 days leave

Job summary

Howden is seeking an experienced Product Owner for our London or Amersham office (hybrid with travel to London once a week). The role supports internal time recording, billing, and document management systems, engaging with clients as needed.

You will drive requirements analysis, roadmapping, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering teams, ensuring delivery against KPIs and aligning with Howden standards.

Qualifications

• Previous experience as Product Owner or in a similar role.
• Experience with back-end products.
• Proficiency with Microsoft tech stack and Azure DevOps (ADO).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to manage complex internal stakeholder groups.

Responsibilities

• Act as primary interface to gather business and technical requirements.
• Maintain roadmaps and communicate product pathways across teams.
• Analyse queries, manage workload and tickets, document solutions.
• Coordinate feature/epic tickets in ADO and plan resource allocation.
• Oversee design, development, testing and release using engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with Product Owners and delivery leads to align roadmaps.
• Drive process improvements and key business project implementations.

Skills

Agile methodologies

Stakeholder management

Microsoft tech stack

Azure DevOps (ADO)

Communication skills

Tools

ADO (Azure DevOps)

Job description

We are seeking an experienced Product Owner for our London or Amersham office (hybrid working with flexibility). Other offices will be considered if the successful candidate is happy to travel to London once a week.

Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager, this role sits within one of our Product/Software Engineering Teams, supporting actuarial, investment and employee benefits platforms and products, with this role focused specifically on internal systems that support the critical business applications for time recording, billing, file exchange, contacts management and Documents management activities. While the role is primarily internally focused, some aspects of the role do support client-facing activity., including client meetings and presentations and dealing with an extended stakeholder landscape.

Our engineering team is diverse in people, technology, and processes, offering a dynamic environment for an experienced leader to drive technical excellence, innovation, and best practice within the internal product portfolio.

A snapshot of your day

• Acting as the primary interface to funnel both business and technical enhancements and be the key point of contact to analyse requirements for work and communicate with the business agreed pathways and details around the products.
• Incorporating new working practices, standards and policies introduced by Howden and ensuring maturity and standards are kept, maintained and reportable (in conjunction with the Engineering Managers and senior management)
• Analyse queries received and manage workload and tickets according to complexity, business priority and team priorities. Where complex issues are raised, analyse and document solutions for resolutions.
• Agree, assign and raise tickets for features and epics (in ADO) and maintain roadmaps using Product Plan. Resolve fewer complex issues within agreed SLAs
• Agree and request resource allocation as required with a view to delivering against agreed metrics and KPIs
• Oversee the design, development, testing and release of software using engineering best practices, and coordinate work with other managers, across different areas and domains
• Work close with Product Owners and delivery leads to build roadmaps that the teams will deliver against
• Take an active role in the implementation of key business project developments and process improvement.
• Drive design and planning activities by removing ambiguities, resolving dependency questions and work with the team to provide engineering estimates and delivery

We would love to hear from you if you have:

• Previous experience in a similar role e.g., Product Owner, QA Analyst etc with experience with back-end products
• Experience in a Microsoft tech stack and be proficient using ADO (Azure DevOps)
• Excellent communication skills, both written and oral and able to seek and deliver clarity and transparency
• Ability to build great relationships with the engineering team and the wider stakeholder group and engineering organisation to contribute to company-wide best managerial and technical practices and standards
• Ability to manage complex requirements with a complex set of internal stakeholders.
• Ability and desire to grow the understanding of Agile within the product set you manage and own
• Good organisational skills and be adaptable to change and the unforeseen

Desirable but not essential:

• Previous experience working in the pensions space, consulting or another highly complex back-end environment is desirable
• Financial services industry experience
• Solid analytical and critical analysis skills are desirable.

We recognise that Product Owners may work in different ways and be from different backgrounds.

What's in it for you:

• Competitive discretionary annual bonus.
• Core benefits including life assurance of four times salary, income protection of 75% of salary for up to five years, and single private medical insurance cover.
• A generous pension scheme with 5% employee contributions matched by a 10% employer contribution.
• 25 days' annual leave, increasing to 27 days after five years' service.
• Access to the Howden flexible benefits programme, offering a wide range of benefits and discounts to support your wellbeing, family life and lifestyle.
• The opportunity to be part of a growing global business where career development, collaboration and innovation are encouraged.

Accessibility

If you require reasonable adjustments or want more information on accessibility, please let us know

Follow Howden on LinkedIn

We kindly ask recruitment agencies to not send speculative CVs. Should we need assistance, we will reach out. All enquiries should be directed to [e-mail]